


Alpha and Omega

by wanderlustlover



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-10-30
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:59:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternate take, this is Bester is on his death bed when he gets a visit from someone claiming to be family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. And Kith, Be Damned

**Author's Note:**

> A story that, I warn, will only make sense to those who have watched Babylon 5, Babylon 5: Crusade and read Psi-Corps Trilogy: Dark Genesis. (And is, very very lightly, possibly decades out after The Phoenix Ascendant Arc in the same time line/universe.)

Coming back hurt more each time. He decided that the lights were too bright. That the blankets were too harsh. The air much too cold each time. The voices too loud. The faces too strong and young. The world was leaving him behind without a choice in the matter.

He really and truly hated that each time he came back he sounded more and more like a child. He complained and whined more. He cried now and then. He wet his bed when he couldn't help it. He complained in his thoughts to himself. All of these things which he hated.

All of these things which made him pray, each time his eye lids scratched open across his eyes, that he would die before his eyes might open again. But each time he opened his eyes the world was still there and he was still being treated for old age and infirmity. He had put it off dozens of years long than anyone expected already. Nothing could stop death, that bastard, the universe was finally coming to swallow him whole.

Clack. Clack.

Clack. Clack.

The sound came from out of no where and he tried to move his body to see over and beyond his bed, an effort none of his body aside from his paranoid mind seemed to respond to.

Clack. Clack.

Clack. Clack.

And then a face. He swore.

"Hello, Mr. Bester."

It could have been anyone but her. Hell, the thought made him laugh, why not her? Why not, indeed? The infallible end was coming and it was trying to make him small again.

But why was it she still seemed so young even with the soft spots at the edges of her eyes? That her eyes carried that same fire deep within the earthen brown and copper tones. And her hair barely seemed to be touched by any gray and where it did, it seemed more regal silver than anything else did.

"Alexander," he rasped out of lips that moved as fast as tectonic plates with a voice that sounded like air being thrust through a straw with a dozen holes in it.

{Why are you here?}

"No fond welcome, Alfred? No curiosity to how I've been and how life's going? How old the children are and the how the husband is doing?" She placed her hands on the side rails to his bed, instituted long ago because he'd fallen out and broken part of his hip in doing so.

"Dear me and I thought we'd broken through all the hostility," she said.

{There never was anything but that, Mrs. Alexander. You cut my throat, I cut yours.} Looking down at him, her face blank, except for a tugging emotion in her eyes he couldn't place. At first he thought it to be that disgusting pity, but it wasn't.

"Call me Lyta. You never really did," she said, while a scraping sound shuddered through the room, and she sat next to his bed. "And it's past time we stopped parading our walls. They've grown lives of their own, amassed body counts, and bleed blood freshly anytime their touched."

{Why are you here?} He shouted at her defiantly, only to have it come out like a whisper. His eyes watered and he flared in annoyance and shame at the fact in the face of one of his life long greatest enemies he was an old, infallible man on his deathbed.

Because he had been bested by this woman.

"Put that all away, we are far past playing with our walls and our tally sheets. No one won the war, Alfred. So many people died on both sides that all we can do is be sickened and try to remember why it happened, why it can never happen again, and get on with our lives." She left her hands on the bars thoughtfully.

"No one knows I'm here. You are perfectly safe," she let go and sat back in her chair, her eyes growing cloudy. "Mercy will be having her next child in two months and that will make five grand children in total. I never thought I would live this long. I always thought one day I would simply die in the line of the job. It's what we were trained for from birth."

"You betrayed," he muttered, barely audibly. It started a string of coughs and she didn't speak till he was done.

"No one ever quits," she said with a hoarse and broken laughter. "The job changes, but the training doesn't ever. I expected to work and die for the Psi-Corps. I expected to work and die for the revolution. There is no more war now, no one to protect them from anymore, anywhere, there hasn't been for years."

{You're babbling, Alexander.} He sent sharply at her, even as he started noticing his body having the twinge reaction that meant he would need to use the bathroom again. {Get to your point and leave me be.}

{Why am I here?} She sent to him with ire in her voice when it touched her head. {Because kith *is* mother and father.}

She felt his eyes close and open a few times, felt waves of anger, confusion and indignation, but she said nothing, expecting little and almost laughed when he finally said resigned to no hate even. {You are not family.}

"Put away your trained sensibilities, your ties to Psi-Corps, and your vendetta against me and the world. For once in this world, for once before you die, miserable and alone as you lived," she said, looking to him. "It's time we both put away out toys and just talked about the truth."

{I would like to just die in peace.} He said, his eyes growing a black fire behind them, one that seemed to take all his strength just to maintain. He just went back to looking tired when the fire faded from his eyes long before he even finished his sentence.

"We are kith from so far back that only the oldest of the old blood running in our veins would remember it. Only those thought echoes, that we are trained to forget, passed down by parents so long ago, would remember the days when. Drop all your old and tired guards, Alfred," She said standing. "Take my hand and let me show you the way."

And echo of the words 'this time' seemed to hang between them though neither said it. There was a long silence, still and suffocating as the pall of death between them. It seemed an eternity between them both in time and distance before he actually did move. He placed his hand in hers and the wave that came from him was defeat.

"No, not surrender. Not an ending, a beginning," she said after a second, a soft light beginning to shine over their two hands. Warmth began to fill his body erasing aches and pains as the space behind his eyes saw only white light and heard only the softness of her voice.

"It all began with six very special people named...Monkey, Blood, Teal, Smoke, Mercy, and James."


	2. And Kith, Never By Blood

"And so," he whispered quietly. "That is the end."

"The end?" She asked curiously, with a disdainful expression. "No, that is only the beginning. It is always only the beginning, no matter where you stand or fall. Just a different beginning to a different story. Just like we are right now."

"And this place?" He asked after a moment, resettling his body, after all it had been quiet a long time since he had sat on the floor. The entire area for as far as he could see was just white. White going on and on with no walls, divisions, or anything of substance that he could see. The only things of substance he could make out were the ground, or solidness on which he presently sat, and Lyta across from him.

"Is neither here nor there," she said, as an impish smile tugged at one side of her lips, but she said no more. Her hair was loose cascading around her, piling softly on the ground where she sat, knees to her chest. She was wearing a plain white gown that clung and moved around her like air and she seemed to be in a more relaxed state than he could remember.

He felt younger, fresher, more awake than he had in years since the moment she'd touched him, brought him here, but that still didn't ease the question of where here was. The last thing he remembered was taking her hand in the hospital bed and being sure that then was as good a time to die as any.

"She was right, you do realize," Lyta said after a moment, quizzically, leaning her cheek against her knee.

"Who was?"

"Louise."

He started to speak, and couldn't even sound a letter feeling flummoxed. The name of the one person in the entire world he felt he had actually and truly failed. The one person who had loved him regardless of who he had been and who he would be become and he had betrayed her to the world he had been raised. To the world which had patted him on his shoulder for his actions and punched him in the gut for the same ones.

"We never loose family, we simply misplace it now and then," she said and for a moment he couldn't tell what emotion touched her face. It seemed like a council of them had taken up residence and we're per say warring for being the one on top but were having a hard time figuring out what it was she felt too.

"Is that what you've convinced yourself to call it, Ms.- Lyta?" He said uncertainly. The name felt foreign and he had spent so little time saying it. Even during the first time he'd met her in the Psi-Corps. "That you have simply misplaced your family?"

"That we can't count on them, either, and we need to realize our independence," Lyta said in a soft whisper, having not yet moved perhaps not even heard his questions. "For to have a large family, few ever do." She tilted her head after a moment so she could meet his eyes. "A rare few. Just like us."

"I hate to put a dampener-"

{No you don't} she 'cast with a smirk

"-and you have enlightened me a great deal about some things I have never been able to place true answers to, but you still haven't told me why you are here. Why come here and tell me all of this? I am old, infallible, and dying. Why come to me now? When I am this?"

"When you are what?" She asked with a light laugh and closed her eyes.

He looked at his hands and realized what he had not. There were no wrinkles and no pale skin. He was clothed in white as she, something he had taken in, but also under all the cloth nothing hurt and ached like normal. He had chalked it up to that fact she was some cross breed of something, something he desperately wanted to know about and would die before finding out, but surely even she couldn't-

He opened his mouth to speak, but was trampled before he started.

{Kith is mother, Kith is father.}

"You don't believe that with as much conviction," he said after a moment. "That is not the only reason is it?"

She tilted her head the opposite way and opened her eyes to look at him again. "I have been walking down the pathways of your soul since I met you, since the moment I knew you, and every moment since. I have a great possibility to offer you. The future."

"But how-"

"I will show you will show me," Lyta said softly, and if he wasn't mistaken there was sadness and steel in that voice, same as what had taken over her eyes. "And then, then you will decided."

* * *

He had been sitting idle for some time. It didn't so much bother nor bore him as one would expect. After his entire job was much to do with just this. Sitting, waiting and watching. He wasn't sure he liked what was happening at all. He wasn't sure it should be done. He knew what to do if it went wrong. He had half a million ways to handle it in the eventually of that.

He shifted in the black cloak and crossed his legs. His wide, livid eyes took in the area and glanced to a clock with minor annoyance. It had been over twenty-four hours now since the mysterious woman had gone missing and the patient she had visited had died so very suddenly of 'unexplained causes'. Where they were he wasn't completely sure, though he did have his theories, millions of those, too.

Creature of the Vorlon, though she were, he waited. None of his kind partook of life the way he did or had since the moment of his initiation, but none would dare align themselves with telepath and no less one so changed by the Vorlon's. It was not code, it was not spoken, it simply was. He, though unrevealed to anyone, had grown rather fond of these escapades. Time and space folded in on itself near him and he only raised his line of site to watch it, to watch the people who stepped out.

A young woman in the prime of her life, with fire touched hair, and shining copper eyes, stepped out first. She had no wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, nor silver in her hair, and she walked in a manor that expressed she felt no fear, at all, for anything. She wore a long white dress he had seen times and times before this that had soft but slightly wide shoulder straps and came down across her body to her feet where she was bare foot. Her expression though usually hard to discern seemed a slight bit amused and underneath that hidden; tired.

The man who appeared seemed only about ten years older than she with dark black hair and tired black eyes. He had no signs of old age either and also bore an outfit of entire white, pants and a short sleeve shirt. His expression was different from hers though and very akin to those who usually came from the unfolding fabric. His was astonishment and fear of truth and of shock, not of himself or where he was, but of everything he knew, everything he'd seen.

"How is my baby?"

"The ship is neither her nor there. It has not moved since it was stopped, for it is not a free thinking, and moving entity," he said with feign of annoyance. The man in the black cloak said, suddenly raking his eyes over the man walking next to Lyta, "You do look dreadfully familiar."

"Do I?" He asked sounding more unsure of himself than he had in ages, probably even so far back as playing Cops and Blips with Brett. Further before there was ego and id and simply the fear. The unnamed and unknown. For the first time in his life he wasn't sure he looked at all familiar to himself.

"Oh, yes," the mage replied, with the dark twinkle in his eyes. His face remained passively and arrogantly straight as he stared at him but his voice though strongly intoned to purpose and presence had mirth under it, a very dark mirth. "Dreadfully. And what shall we call you?"

"Stephen," he said before he could stop the name from leaving his mouth. Oddly though it was an amused feeling that touched him after he realized he'd said and he nodded. "Stephen Dexter."

"I see," he said, nodding just slightly and the man he watched seemed slightly to pale as if he feared the mage might honestly be looking straight through him. Right up until the moment he spun on his feet, completely dismissing a man the world now claimed dead, and headed to the controls after Lyta, saying with impertinence, "And now?"

"Home, Galen." She said, a small smile gracing her, just to vanish as she sat down. "Now we go home."

She had no fear that the men behind her would bicker and brawl and argue and slowly across years and reasons find a mutual respect that neither would claim to want or realize was happening..after all, they were stunningly alike in the many unseen ways...that only your other Kith could see.


End file.
